Max Brand

His Back Against the Wall

Warsaw 2019

Contents

I. THE REBUFF

II. GOING WEST

III. TWO BANDITS

IV. DIVIDING THE SPOIL

V. AFTER THE FIGHT

VI. DISCOVERY

VII. THE FAMOUS FABRICATION

VIII. WEST OF THE ROCKIES

IX. THE HEROIC COWARD

X. CHEERS—AND THEN SOME

XI. THE SEVERE TEST

XII. TAMPICO JOE, BADMAN

XIII. CALLING A BLUFF

XIV. THE ESCAPE

I. THE REBUFF

A FLY had been dropped in the ointment of perfect happiness for Jeremy Dice. Many elements had gone into the making of his joy this evening. In the first place, he had upon his arm at Kadetzsky’s ball the prettiest girl at the dance, Dorothy Petwell. In the second place, he had distinguished himself by the introduction of a pas de deux entirely new in popular dancing–a pair of dragging steps with a jar at the end of them that had enraptured every girl to whom he had shown it and had made other young gentlemen grind their teeth in anguish. In the third and most important place, he could say with perfect assurance that tonight he was the best-dressed man on the floor. Kadetzsky’s ball was the only occasion during the year when they aspired to full dress. During the rest of the twelve months the young swells of the society labored and saved and racked their brains for the means to produce a dress suit that would include at least one novelty. Young Saylor had easily borne away the palm last year; it had been Harrison Bean the year before; but tonight Jeremy Dice was the victor. He appeared in a delicately fitted suit whose tails arched out and floated behind him like chanticleer’s two most gorgeous feathers. His necktie was white, edged marvelously with thin black. Above all, his waistcoat was white, crowded with black stripes so small and neatly patterned that at a distance the garment gave the effect of a distinguished gray. It was, indeed, a stunning costume, and Jeremy, as usual, wore it to the very best advantage. Yet, while this triumphal evening wore on, as stated before, a fly was dropped in the ointment. It was a remark made by Dorothy Petwell.

“Some day after we’re married, Jeremy dear, we’ll go out West, won’t we?”

Jeremy looked down at her in amazement. Even in the midst of his astonishment he found himself admiring her hair. For Dorothy Petwell worked in a Fifth Avenue hairdresser’s establishment, and she set the fashion of hair modes at least three weeks ahead of the other girls who danced at Kadetzsky’s.

“West?” gasped Jeremy. “West? Why West?”

“I’ll tell you why. I get, oh, the most wonderful letters from my cousin, Jim, out in Wyoming. He says it’s a... a... ‘man-sized country’... that’s what he calls it. ‘The country makes the man’... that’s what he writes to me.”

“Hah!” said Jeremy. “I call that bunk.” He arched his not overlarge chest. He was distinctly not Grecian, but, being a tailor, he made the most of his possibilities.

“Being a tailor is well enough,” went on Dorothy, “but...”

He was astonished by her seriousness.

“But you could be something more,” she said, looking earnestly at Jeremy Dice. “You’re a natural leader of men, Jeremy. You ought to be out where there are real men to lead. Riding horses, you know. Throwing ropes and things on cattle. Why, they take great big bulls by the horns and wrestle with them and throw them, Jeremy, dear. Think of doing that. You could, if you tried.”

“Hmm,” Jeremy said.

A fragmentary picture of himself, facing a bull, flashed into his mind. He gracefully waved aside the compliment with a lean, firm hand. The girl followed the gesture with her eyes. Usually the hands of Jeremy Dice fascinated her.

“Good hands for cards,” somebody had once said. Work with the needle and scissors had made them exquisitely swift of movement. There was something of cat-like speed and sureness in every movement that Jeremy made with his hands. One was aware of much nervous force piled up in him, and Jeremy’s hands connected with that nerve power.

But tonight those hands did not satisfy Dorothy Petwell. They seemed too much like her own hands. She had in mind the brown, huge fist of Cousin Jim. She sighed.

“I think it’s pretty good right here in little old New York,” said Jeremy Dice. “You’ll get over these romantic ideas, Dottie. Believe me, the West ain’t all that it’s said to be. Too much work... too little coin. That’s what it means. Besides, here I am working my way up in the business. The boss says I’ll be picking off a junior partnership one of these days. What d’you know about that?”

He had saved this choice bit of news. And Dorothy Petwell gasped.

“But,” she said a moment later, “a tailor isn’t...”

“Isn’t what?” he asked, angry and aggressive.

“Doesn’t ride horses,” she replied foolishly.

He looked down at her again in pity. She knew that she had been absurd, and she dared not meet his eye.

“Of course, he doesn’t,” and Jeremy Dice chuckled. “D’you expect me to sit a saddle and thread a needle?”

At this she did look up. He was surprised to see a shadow behind her eyes rather than in them. If he had been any other than Jeremy Dice, leader of fashion at Kadetzsky’s ball and rising tailor, he would have imagined that she was judging him, weighing him, and finding him light, indeed. Although Jeremy felt that this was impossible, something in the attitude of Dorothy Petwell piqued him. He deliberately slighted her for the next few dances and turned his attention to other girls, who received him brightly. For was he not the finest dancer, the aptest and most gracefully dressed man on the floor? An air of distinction surrounded Jeremy that included the girls to whom he favored recognition. At length he returned to Dorothy because he had found that she still watched him in a thoughtful manner, not at all envious of his new companions.

She greeted his return without undue joy. Then, alarmed, he began to court her deftly, softening his voice to talk of her own affairs. She persisted in being absent-minded. She was not hard, she was worse–she was thinking of other things.

So a shade began to fall over the triumph of Jeremy Dice. Not that he began to criticize himself. He attributed it all to the pig-headedness that he felt to be a characteristic of all girls. He grew so concerned that finally he allowed Dottie to take him into the reception room. It was there that the terrible blow fell. He should have known. He should have remembered that the boss had said he was going with his daughter to this affair. He should have remembered all this, but it was brought thunderingly home into his mind by a great voice that called from the side of the reception room: “Dice! Hey, Dice!”

He turned. He was aware of the big, bloated form of the boss, his face more red-purple than ever, perspiration streaming down his face and over his tight collar. It was, indeed, Stanislas Gorgenheim himself. And a cold, sick wave sped through the veins of the tailor.

He bowed and started on, smiling, but the big voice pursued him.

“Hey, Dice. Don’t run off. It’s you that I want to talk to. Come back here, Dice!”

“Do you let any man talk to you like that?” Dorothy whispered at his shoulder in a singularly small voice.

“It’s the big boss, Dottie. I got to talk to him. He... he doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s just his way. Wait a minute. I’ll be right back.”

“No, I’ll go along.”

Very slowly he returned. He came in range of the sound of Gorgenheim’s puffing.

“Good evening, Mister Gorgenheim,” said Jeremy pleasantly. He had disarmed the boss more than once by his address, but this time fate ruled otherwise.

“So,” the fat man said. “You got it, eh?”

His thick finger pointed, swept over Jeremy from the heel to the shoulders. And Jeremy understood that all was known. The sense of disaster paralyzed him. Then: “Hush, Mister Gorgenheim. Let me explain...”

“It is not the hushing,” retorted the boss in a loud voice.

Everyone in the room was listening. The walls seemed to Jeremy to be covered with bright, wide eyes.

“It is not the hushing,” repeated the big man. “It is the suit. Where did you get it, maybe, Dice? Maybe you paid me? No? Maybe you bought it, no? Where did you get it, eh?”

“Mister Gorgenheim...”

“Jeremy Dice, you have the suit stole!”

“Mister Gorgenheim, I only borrowed it...”

“Borrowed! I am a child, maybe, no? Hushings, is it? No, it is takings. Go back and put that suit where you got it in the shop, Dice! Go quick!”

Jeremy could not speak. A deep-hearted prayer that the floor might open and swallow him was not granted. He turned away, and about him he saw the faint, small, condemning smiles from the women. The men were chuckling openly and whispering about it. Oh, there would be nothing else talked about for a month at Kadetzsky’s. He was ruined.

“I suppose you want to go home?” Dorothy asked after he rejoined her and they reached the hall. He looked down stupidly at her.

“Well, you’ll go along, won’t you, Dottie?”

“I’ll stay. Joe will take me home, I guess.”

Out of the depths of his shame he fired a little. “I suppose you’re turning me down, Dottie, just because I wore a suit that didn’t belong to me?”

She did not speak.

“Ain’t you a little ashamed, Dottie?”

“Listen, Jeremy,” said the girl very calmly, “it isn’t the stuff about the clothes. But... I’ve just seen a good many things. First of all, I see that you’re just a tailor.”

It was brutal, but they were alone. Dottie Petwell had only a moment.

“Go on,” said the tailor stolidly.

“Now you do look mad. You look like a big wildcat. But I’m not a man. You can’t fight me. Why didn’t you look like that when you faced that fat, horrible Gorgenheim? You stood before him like a whipped puppy, and you made me sick, Jeremy. I...”

“You want me to go West, eh?”

“I never want to see you again... until you’re different.”

“Listen,” said the tailor, “I don’t think you ever will see me again... you or any of the rest.” And he fled.

II. GOING WEST

JEREMY’S mind was a blank. Somehow he reached his room. He stood vainly, trying to understand. He had worn a suit out of the shop, something he had done before many times. Because of that crime he had broken with his girl, had incurred the wrath of his employer, and had snapped a cord binding him to his past. He saw little except the contemptuous face of Dorothy Petwell.

“What does she want me to be?” he cried softly.

He thrust his fingers through his hair and rumpled it, tore his collar open at the throat, and leaned to peer into his mirror. The lean, savage face that he saw there frightened him. He sat down and began to collect his wits.

“Something has happened,” he kept saying aloud. “I... I’d like to break something.”

Only a tailor–the phrase kept coming back at him like a persistent echo. He felt that he would be able to hear it in every still moment during the rest of his life. Go West! He was a little over thirty years old, had a good job with steady advancement behind him and before him. Suddenly all these bright prospects became nothing. Only a tailor damned them.

Unquestionably there was a good deal of the child and the dreamer in Jeremy Dice, or he would never have sustained the impulse long enough to act on it. But, when a child grows sullen, it is apt to throw itself off a cliff or chase its own family with a knife. Jeremy was wrapped in sullen hatred of the world. A sullen man–or child–hates the world because he feels that the world despises him.

At any rate, before dawn of the next morning Jeremy Dice was far westward, shivering in the black night in a lumber yard beside the railroad. A round-faced man, ragged, stood shivering beside him.

“Which way, cull?”

“West.”

“You and me. There’s the Four-Twenty. Come on.”

And half a minute later he was riding the rods.

It was the most terrible day of his life. A score of times his mind jumped–as from the unconscious to the conscious. The cinders cutting into his face, the rush of freezing air, the roar of the train, the vast chuckling of the wheels on the rails–he would become aware of these in that jump of the mind. How did he happen to be here? What was he doing, imperiling his life to get to a place where he did not want to be?

Yet, he kept at it. Behind his mind there was the childish, sullen determination to show them. He would go West. In a way, after starting, he was ashamed to turn back. Eventually he would return to Dorothy Petwell. “I’ve been to your old West. Nothing there but desert. Now I’m back. Take me or leave me, New York for mine.”

He was riding shamelessly on top of the freight on this evening. It had been deathly hot all day in the box car, with sittings of acrid dust through the cracks. It got into his nose and made him sneeze. It got into his eyes, and the tears ran down his cheeks. He had blessed the oncoming of night and the dicker with the friendly brakeman that had enabled him to climb onto the top of the car. The scent of alkali was still in the air, keen, subtle, drying the throat, yet it was heaven compared with the heat of the car during the day. On either side, before or behind, he could see nothing except limitless flat. Unquestionably this was the crossing of the desert to which everyone had been referring. Sometimes, glancing over the obscure flat, he wondered if human beings actually lived out here so far from Broadway.

Mostly he kept his chin up and his eyes on the sky. The stars were marvelously close and bright. It occurred to Jeremy Dice that he was really seeing them for the first time. To be sure, he had noticed them now and then on the boat for Coney Island when he rode on the top deck. But usually his sky was blocked at night by the upper reaches of skyscrapers, and he had never looked higher than the electric signs on Broadway. But here it was different. His eye leaped a dizzy distance past the lower, brighter stars into infinitely far-off regions where they clustered like a faintly luminous dust.

“Oh, Lord,” and Jeremy Dice sighed, “this is a queer old world.”

He looked up to the brakeman.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“Good,” said the brakeman. “I like to see ’em comfortable. But what about me?”

“It’s all right. I fixed it with Jem.”

“Jem ain’t me. Jem stopped end of the last division. You’re starting all over, bo.”

Jeremy shrugged his shoulders. “How much?”

“Oh, I’m reasonable. One buck will fix me fine.”

Dice reached into his pocket. His hand leaped out again as though it had been burned. It slipped swiftly through his clothes, pocket after pocket.

“I... I’ve been rolled,” he cried. “They’ve picked me!”

“That old stuff?” retorted the brakeman. “Say, bo, I ain’t a new one. Come on! Fork over the stuff. I’ll take it in nickels, that’s how reasonable I am.”

“I tell you I’m busted!”

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